A still from The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S Porter in 1903. Photograph: Ronald Grant archive

It says something about the cultural resonance of film when Monday's £30m theft of diamonds from Brussels airport wasn't condemned as an act of criminality or something that, doubtlessly, left innocent people traumatised with the experience of being threatened by masked men with machine guns. It was a glamorous heist, obviously. You know, just like the ones George Clooney does in his spare time.

Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Perhaps it is, simply, how we (and the media) make sense of senseless things: to stamp them with a glossy sort of Hollywood narrative. Yet there is something about the enduring "glamour" of this particular narrative – the calculated criminality of the heist story – that has hooked us in since the film noir The Asphalt Jungle laid down the blueprint for the genre in the 1950s. The dubious rush of crime has always formed some part of film – 1903's The Great Train Robbery being an early example – but it was here that it truly started to pay.

The Asphalt Jungle, in which a group of men meticulously plot a jewel heist, came at a time of flux for cinema. Crime stories, thanks in part to the raw reaction to 1920s prohibition laws, were popular, but they were also restricted by strict censorship. Throughout the 1930s, for instance, James Cagney's string of popular gangster films for Warner Bros came with warnings at the beginning and the Hollywood production code specified that "methods of crime" such as "theft, robbery, safe-cracking and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc," should not be "explicitly presented" or "detailed in method". This only solidified the dangerous, shadowy mystique, however, and by the time of The Asphalt Jungle the code was beginning to crack.

Photograph: Public domain

From then on, the heist was presented as something of an art form: something that required complex methodology and hard work. There were huge stakes, unbeatable odds and a couple of guys who just decided to take a shot at the big time. Whether they were depicted as squabbling, opportunistic thieves or the playboy criminals of the original Ocean's 11, it didn't matter. It's all about the intricacy of the plan and the risk of its execution. It demands respect from the viewer. It also happens to help that most of us don't own any diamonds, priceless works of art or bank vaults full of cash. It's a faceless, victimless crime, after all. Why wouldn't you root for them? It's not like they're robbing you.

This, it seems, is the difference between a "heist" and a robbery. We're removed from the grandiose concepts of heist films such as Ocean's 11 and The Thomas Crown Affair, and the likable cheeky chappies of The Italian Job. Doubtless we'd be less sympathetic and in awe if the grand crime was just two blokes who planned to mug you on the way home or rob a local, family-run off-licence. Hence why, as violent cinema became more popular, films such as Reservoir Dogs, Heat and The Usual Suspects – all inspired by ahead-of-its-time 1950s French film Rififi – turned this idea of sharp-suited, jet-setting glamour on its head and presented it as it is: nasty crimes done by nasty people who are, quite frankly, dicks. When referring to the Belgian robbery, it's probably best that we keep that in mind.